Another day, another scare story? As we wrote this piece in April, the latest vaping-related worry to surface in Britain’s headlines was…well, it wasn’t clear quite what it was.
The story was based on a new tranche of research from University College London’s Smoking Toolkit Study, a long-running and decidedly non-sensationalist survey of the nation’s tobacco and nicotine consumption, which found that use of disposables had declined in advance of the UK’s forthcoming ban on them, with vapers switching to other devices.
“A British study says it is unlikely that people will stop vaping completely after the ban is introduced,” warned Sky News. And yet “stopping people” — or at least adults — “vaping completely” was not the point of the disposables ban.
If there had been evidence from this research that youth vaping rates were continuing to rise, with large numbers of underage vapers starting out on other devices instead of disposables, that might indeed be concerning. But there wasn’t: the study doesn’t cover under-16s anyway, and among 16-to-24-year-olds, vaping rates had remained more or less stable between April 2024 and January 2025.
So what was the problem — that adults would continue to vape? Or that non-disposable devices would still be available for young people to buy?
Reading between the lines, of course, you might say the real story that Sky and others were trying to get across was: “The government sold us on the disposables ban as a way to prevent youth vaping entirely, and it doesn’t look like that will be achieved.”
And there would be some validity to that argument, though no level-headed person could have believed that a disposables ban would ever eliminate youth vaping completely. Remember, retailers were already acting illegally in selling these devices to under-18s, before the ban came in; it would be strange to imagine that the same shopkeepers who were happy to flog disposables to kids would suddenly be super-scrupulous in their observation of the law when it came to other types of vape.
Of course, there are so many minor moral panics about vaping in the British media that we have all become largely inured to them, and presumably their effect on the broader public — people with no passionate feelings for or against e-cigarettes — has also waned.
After all, you’d have to work hard to still believe that vaping was going to have all the dreadful effects we were warned about a decade ago, when evidence for them (beyond the anecdotal scale) is so painfully lacking. (Where exactly is that great upsurge in young smokers…?)
Individual news stories perhaps don’t, then, have the negative impact they might once have. Vaping is no longer as novel, as “other”, as it once was; everyone knows vapers. But still, the accumulated effect of panicked media coverage surely doesn’t help the fortunes of the vape sector in Westminster (or Holyrood), let alone in the court of public opinion.
The most egregious example this year came when a preliminary report on a study purporting to show adverse cardiovascular consequences from vaping, similar to those caused by smoking, was shared with a tabloid newspaper before being published.
The study, by Maxime Boidin at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Institute of Sport, involved measuring the vascular function of 20 vapers, 20 smokers and a control group of 20 who neither smoked nor vaped. The elasticity of blood vessels in their arms and necks was measured as an indicator of vascular health, and further fitness tests were also given.
Results from the tests were shared with the Mirror, which was even allowed to observe participants in the study’s closing stages. The researchers appeared to have theorised before starting their study that regular vaping would have significant deleterious impacts, with symptoms such as coughing, chest pain or lung dysfunction.
Boidin told the Mirror this theory was confirmed – even more so than he had expected — and that the dangers of vaping were no different from those of smoking. The culprit, he proposed, was inflammation caused by nicotine, as well as metals and chemicals inhaled while vaping.
And perhaps more significantly, he also moved beyond the strictly physiological into discussing regulation, suggesting that fewer limitations on vaping in public places compared with smoking could be leading to vape-related health problems. (Never mind that in the UK, the practical number of places where you can vape but not smoke is nowhere near as big as sometimes believed; vaping may not be as widely illegal as the use of combustibles, but bans by premises owners are ubiquitous.)
Unsurprisingly, many harm-reduction specialists were unimpressed by Boidin rushing to publicise his conclusions. For example, it was unclear how the study defined “long-term vaping”, or how it dealt with past smoking behaviour (a huge issue in all studies of vaping’s health effects).
At the time, a Manchester Metropolitan spokesperson told ECigIntelligence that to avoid confusion, Boidin preferred not to discuss the study further. And in itself, it doesn’t matter greatly; the noise generated by its premature release may have been considerable, but as with all such media scares, it died down soon enough.
The bigger and more serious concern for advocates of vaping and tobacco harm reduction, whether in the industry or not, is — as with the more recent coverage of the Smoking Toolkit Study — the way that a negative angle on vaping was seized on by reporters with such alacrity.
A single story may not make much difference, but the relentless drumbeat of them is a major factor in creating hostility among regulators (and even health professionals who should know better). Addressing that is much harder than getting a single story corrected, unfortunately, but it remains one of the central challenges in achieving balanced, objectively informed regulation.
Barnaby Page and Freddie Dawson, ECigIntelligence
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